Procurement Scams: The Lucrative World of Medical Equipment
Billers, prescribers who are influenced by gifts and doctors who are not fully qualified are generally what people imagine when thinking about healthcare corruption in India. Another frustrating and unseen way patients are exploited happens during the quiet bureaucratic work of deciding on hospital equipment. There, people invest a million rupees in machines, increase the size of contracts, overlook quality and quietly take public money — all in private and with horrible results.
The Market for Machines that Keep People Alive
Ventilators. Dialysis units. Technical images are often made with MRI and CT machines. Operation tables. Patient monitors. Even devices as simple as oxygen concentrators and suction pumps are vital to every hospital. Yet, in India, those essential drugs have turned into ways for companies to make profits, with less focus on what hospitals or patients require.
Usually a government hospital will organise and announce a tender for necessary medical equipment. Several private bidders put in offers for the job. An open and fair competition should happen throughout the hiring process. As a result, the game is fixed beforehand — vendors’ bids are set, the provided technical specifications help one firm and others are either rejected outright or ignored.
Many times, these favoured vendors will quote prices far higher than the market price. This influence often brings an award, given to procurement officers, hospital administrators and once to local politicians. The bills are, for the most part, paid by ordinary citizens. The supplier makes a lot of money. Now, what about the equipment?. Not infrequently, these services are defective, do not comply with specifications or fail to be delivered at all.
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COVID-19: Spreading Corruption Across the World
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the volume of this procurement scam was shockingly high. Because ventilators and essential equipment were more needed than ever, fraud also exploded.
Officials found a ₹37 Crore ventilator procurement scam in Madhya Pradesh in 2021. There was no prior experience in medical devices among the company the state health department purchased machines from. Most of the ventilators provided did not work or couldn’t be used in the typical hospital environment. In both Bhopal and Indore, many doctors have reported patients dying because of machine failures while in critical care.
In Maharashtra, another study found that each of the oxygen concentrators purchased for ₹1.1 lakh each was also available in the market for just ₹45,000.
In Gujarat, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, faulty ventilators, Chinese-made equipment with German labels and ineffective PPE items arrived at hospitals. In some cases, the phoney companies were set up overnight to obtain the contracts and then disappear after the money was paid out.
Fraudsters also use ghost equipment and phoney invoices.
In several smaller areas, the scam gets even worse because there isn’t any equipment to send to the victims.
They makes arrangements with one another to fabricate purchase orders, invent expensive invoices and then take the money. When these locations are visited during audits, the teams discover wards are empty, rooms not put into use and machines that were supposed to be installed ages before are still unopened in storage.
Just last year in Jharkhand, a paper report showed that three ventilators were in use at a hospital, but they were, in fact, not available. Not one was apparent during the search. We discovered the machines did not show up, but the funds were marked as spent and documented.
A recent report from the CAG in 2023 found that, in 12 Indian states, almost ₹1,800 crore of medical products could not be accounted for by many hospitals.
Who Benefits? Everyone except the Patient
A chain of people receives the benefits from corruption.
Politicians agreeing on excess budgets, in exchange for personal benefits
Bureaucrats who manipulate tender offers to win the approval of some vendors
• People who smooth the way between the seller and the buyer
• Administrators at hospitals who accept signed receipts for goods that never existed
• Those who regularly have multiple companies and earn from them no matter the results
At the same time, patients endure problems with inferior equipment. When monitors break, nurses find ways to use other equipment. Doctors must decide whether to save a life without access to good, reliable medical devices. In many rural areas, the devices on-hand have rarely been used since no one has been trained.
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Many Public Numbers Do Not Represent the ‘Real World’
When you look at government documents, India’s public hospitals seem adequately provided for. Large sums have been allocated in the budget for smart devices. Even so, most wards are dark, ICUs are silent and emergency rooms lack enough supplies. It’s not by luck that paperwork and infrastructure differ in the country — leaders purposely create this divide.
The insurance world sees a lot of fake utilisation reports, arranged photos and stage-managed surveys. When ministers accompany a hospital visit, some of the needed equipment is borrowed for a brief time from private clinics and returned as soon as the visit ends. Having everything ready for emergency cases means that patients can readily die, despite those solutions being on file.
Price manipulation and secret business agreements
The scam affects more than government hospitals. Among private hospitals, companies often work with selected suppliers to purchase high-cost equipment which the patients have to cover. Occasionally, a person may hold shares in both the supplier company and the hospital, even though the practise is considered unethical by law.
An example is that a ₹8,000 cardiac stent purchased directly from the factory could be billed to the patient for ₹50,000. Last year, rules set by the government limited pricing on these devices, but hospitals found clever ways out — overcharging for other services or claiming to use medical supplies that came from abroad with forged documents.
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It is difficult to recognise when a Procurement Scam is happening.
Unclear to the eye, equipment procurement fraud is not like advertised extortion and happens over time. It usually includes:
• Intentionally adding detail to the storey
• There are not enough trained auditors.
• Assisting one another in abusing duty
• Low quality digital tracking technologies
Those who expose illegal practises continue to encounter obstacles. If an official raises a red flag, the person is frequently moved, given a lower position or put on suspension. Because of friendly political connexions, the wrongdoers act freely and without consequences.
Should Education Reform or Rot? Our Journey to the Future
To solve this problem, just improving our audits is not enough. It requires:
Public dashboards that update in real time for all procurement contracts and deliveries
• Audits from independent groups to check the quality of equipment brought by third parties
• Laws that invite whistle-blowers and actually enforce their protections
All the equipment bought is now digitally recorded and can be tagged by GPS.
Eliminating vendors caught in any type of fraudulent behaviour
However, even stronger than all that, India should treat hospitals not as ways to gain profit but as important sacred sites for healing.
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When thousands in the country are killed annually because they lack basic life-saving gadgets, the existence of unsuitable, unused or phoney machines becomes a moral offence. That’s why, hidden under tender, invoice and digital signature details, it’s happening every day.
Fake Degrees and Ghost Doctors: A Parallel Industry of Impostors
In India, where a doctor’s word is treated with reverence and a white coat commands instant authority, the idea that someone with no real medical training could be diagnosing illnesses, performing surgeries, or signing death certificates sounds unthinkable. Yet, across the length and breadth of the country, fake doctors and forged medical degrees have become disturbingly common — forming a parallel, invisible healthcare industry that thrives on deception, desperation, and systemic apathy.
This isn’t just a rural quack with a stethoscope and a dream. This is an organized racket, with roots that stretch from coaching centres in Kota to shady universities in Eastern Europe, from corrupt medical council officials to politicians who protect their vote-bank doctors in exchange for loyalty.
The Underground Pipeline: How Fake Doctors Are Manufactured
At the heart of this dark network is a two-fold supply chain: those who never earned a degree, and those who bought one.
In cities like Kolkata, Patna, and Hyderabad, fake medical colleges operate without recognition from the National Medical Commission (NMC). Some run shadow classes, others exist only on paper. For a price between ₹20 lakh to ₹80 lakh, they offer everything — admission letters, semester results, internships, and finally, MBBS degrees. In some cases, they even forge NMC registration numbers, giving their graduates a cloak of legitimacy.
Some people offer distance-learning programmes that are actually foreign degree scams. A number of countries such as Ukraine (pre-war), Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and some parts of China and the Philippines allow Indian students to complete MBBS degrees quickly, leaving them without access to proper practical labs, training on real corpses or supervised clinical experience. A number of these students, not managing to pass the FMGE, come back to India and practise without permission. What’s concerning is that private hospitals often accept them despite anything more than looking at their certificates.
Government Hospitals are the setting for Ghost Doctors.
The changes are present in government hospitals too. A CBI investigation last year revealed that 200 ‘ghost doctors’ were getting paid by district hospitals in Uttar Pradesh.
These individuals:No days at work have ever passed for me.
• Employed dishonest documents to gain a suitable job
• Earning a steady salary for many years though I didn’t provide treatment to any patients
Clerks and HR teams made fake attendance logs and issued fake salaries along with the scammer. A fake doctor in Sitapur claimed to be seeing patients in three hospitals, although not one of them had evidence that he had stopped by in over five years.
At the same time, MBBS graduates have trouble getting postings which causes patients to wait without medical help.
The Harm that People Face: Malpractice, Misdiagnosis and Death
If unqualified people are doctors, misdiagnosis becomes regular practise. Just last year in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, the deaths of 12 children from encephalitis highlighted the real danger of fake medical degrees when a doctor known for forging his credentials looked after those children. After seven years of practise, the individual still didn’t know how to handle paediatric emergencies.
In Mumbai’s crowded slums, where there are more unofficial clinics than licenced ones, fake dentists pull teeth and do root canals without making sure the area is disinfected or the patient is numbed. As a result, many people experience infections, nerve injury and can die because of septicaemia.
Some women in rural Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh lost their lives when impostor obstetricians ruined their deliveries. Usually, "doctors" are safeguarded by neighbourhood netas or sarpanches since this brings political advantages for them.
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There is an emerging Credential Scam Industry.
Unfortunately, MBBS is not the only degree online sellers claim to provide. This occupation also covers:
• Many radiology, pathology and anaesthesia clinics use phoney diplomas (often found in diagnostic centres)
• Most of these degrees are forged, printed in advanced desktop programmes and posted on websites
• Registration at medical councils in return for bribes
A 2020 report from the Medical Council of India found more than 5,000 medical practitioners who had questionable documents. There were many who hadn’t attended the national entrance test properly or had others substitute for them in past attempts.
Some networks give out real doctors’ registration numbers to illegal clinics, so although the name on the prescription is authentic, it’s the fake doctor who signs it.
People who expose wrongdoing are silence, patients feel like they do not know better.
Records have shown that those doctors and nurses who try to expose fraudulent doctors frequently deal with harsh reactions. The media dismiss them, spare them from serving or drive them towards keeping quiet. A 2022 incident from Assam involved a nurse who disclosed her colleague’s fraudulent academic documents — and ended up with a notice of misconduct.
In rural and semi-urban areas, people have few opportunities to cheque the qualifications of their doctors. Since a lot of people don’t understand medical words and still turn to authorities, doctors rarely have their decisions questioned.
In cities, too, appearance and professional ways are all it takes to get someone to trust a phoney expert.
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Failures in Regulation and Political Connections
Why haven’t things changed?
Because regulators usually have a lack of money, employees and sometimes cooperate with illegal acts. Medical councils do not usually examine the practise of doctors. The process for many police cases takes many years to finish. Most cases aren’t prosecuted. Across many regions, there are fake doctors who join political parties in exchange for using illegal practises and remaining unpunished.
Certain politicians in West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh say these medical practitioners help the community and claim their lack of training is irrelevant.
When security highly limits street protests, it is mainly symbolic and only temporary. A few arrests occur, some clinics are shut down and the activities pick up again—usually in a nearby district under a different name.
A risk that involves national security
The subject goes beyond health; it’s also a concern for national security. When impostors work in disaster zones, health camps or during epidemics, posing as experts, they cause more trouble than they solve.
Careless staff may vaccinate patients with the wrong shots, recommend ancient medicines, fill out incorrect data forms and often create future epidemics from improper handling of waste.
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A Major Loss of Trust
There is more to the havoc than just the numbers show. When local health care is run by fake doctors, authentic doctors also become distrusted. As people become less confident in hospitals, they often ignore their symptoms and stop getting treatment which raises death rates overall.
Because India already has a shortage of doctors compared to other countries in the G20, it cannot handle the big loss of moral values in its healthcare.
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To Sum Up: An Industry Right in Front of Us
Having thousands of fake doctors, phoney degrees and illegal clinics is a very real problem in India’s healthcare. You can see it in big cities, within walking distance of subways, inside many rented homes and on signs advertising miraculous cures.
If we don’t strengthen laws, enforce real audits and keep people accountable, the fake drug makers will still work side by side with the official industry, unnoticed, unchecked and causing harm.
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The newspapers are highlighting repeated cases of fake doctors and fake certificates in several Indian states. Let’s take a look at well-known court cases:
1. Karnataka: Quacks Said to Work at More Than 960 Places
In the past 1.5 years, Karnataka’s health department identified and arrested 967 people for practising medicine without qualifications. Among other measures, officials served notices to 449 individuals, shut down 228 clinics, seized 167 clinics and handed down penalties to 96 people. District courts have received more than 70 cases at this point. (Deccan Herald)
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2. In Gujarat, 14 people were arrested for buying fake educational degrees.
Last December, fourteen people were arrested by Gujarat Police because they acquired fake medical degrees for ₹70,000 from a gang based in Surat. The Board of Electro Homoeopathic Medicine (BEHM) Gujarat was made up just for the purpose of issuing the degrees. Among their offerings was a collection of 1,200 phoney degrees which the gang recommended to people with as little as an eighth-grade education. (www.ndtv.com)
3. Multiple deaths are blamed on a fake cardiologist in Madhya Pradesh.
On April 2025, Narendra Yadav or Narendra John Camm, was arrested in Madhya Pradesh for pretending to be a cardiologist. It is alleged that Dr. Kumar performed heart surgeries at a missionary hospital in Damoh and seven of those patients died. The ensuing investigation showed he had purchased fake medical certificates and had been identified for false activities in 2013.
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4. West Bengal: More than 500 people claiming to be doctors have been found to be fake.
In 2007, the CID of West Bengal revealed that more than 500 fake doctors were practising in the state. A lot of these doctors worked at leading hospitals in Kolkata such as Belle Vue Clinic and Kothari Medical. The CID organised a nationwide investigation, closed down counterfeit medical centres and plans to launch an app aimed at detecting fake doctors. (Wikipedia)
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5. Delhi: Repeating Offender Reprises His Role
In November of 2023, police made an arrest of Dr. Neeraj Agarwal in Delhi because 15 patients had died at his clinic, Agarwal Medical Centre. Even though his charges were quite dire, he was allowed to pay bail in August 2024 and returned to his medical work by March 2025. (Hindustan Times)
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6. Jharkhand: An Ex-Student of Class 12 Allegedly Works as a General Physician
In May of 2025, the court sentenced Pradmanavan Mukhi Karwa, who had finished Class XII in Jharkhand, to 29 months in prison for masquerading as a licenced doctor. He was operating at the dialysis centre of Rourkela Government Hospital, pretending to be Dr. Ramesh Chandra Jha. This editorial is written by The Times of India.)
These cases highlight the pervasive issue of unqualified individuals practicing medicine across various Indian states, posing significant risks to public health and safety.
Medical Education is Where Corruption Grows
The system for training Indian doctors is highly appreciated worldwide, but it is also corrupt due to greed, favouritism, caste discrimination and large financial wrongdoings. The idea of a fair entry process into public service is now, unfortunately, often replaced by dishonest bargains, secret methods and failed ambitions.
The Indian Medical Seat Auction
Privatisation at the centre of this crisis affects medical education. There are only around 100,000 MBBS seats in the country for the more than 2.2 million students who take NEET. Now, admission is treated like a product and medical seats serve as precious items bought and sold in public.
In Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, students at select private medical colleges must pay between ₹50 lakh and ₹1.5 crore in capitation fees for an MBBS seat. The trouble is, this fee is on top of the official tuition and is often paid with unreported cash, growing the amount of black money by a lot. The outcome? Some students who fail in NEET can still be admitted by paying fees, while many students from poorer backgrounds who do well in NEET have to either give up or start looking at overseas universities.
Deemed Universities: Hiding Behind a Licence
It is mainly the deemed universities which the UGC has given autonomy, that have become popular for motioning medical education toward commercialism. There are institutes who revise their fees each year, invent seats targeted at specific groups (like NRI Sponsored, Institutional Quota and so on) and raise the prices to go over ₹1 crore for a single seat. As a result, a number of them offer substandard facilities, have phantom professors and are not recognised by the latest accreditations.
· Last year, a report from the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) indicated that several deemed medical universities initially provided fake faculty information during inspections. There were papers with professors’ pictures, although they never actually taught us. I did not have any opportunities for clinical practise. Even with these flaws, licences were often renewed by collaboration with corrupt officials or political help.
· NEET Conspiracy: How Coaching Became a Business
· Instead of levelling the admissions process, the NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test) has opened the way for pricey coaching institutes which often charge students from as early as Class 9. In Kota, Hyderabad and Delhi, the pressure to get good exam scores has turned the cities into study-only places, forcing teens to work for 14 hours with an unhealthy psychological toll on many.
· Since the coaching industry has become so big, counting over ₹25,000 crore, NEET mainly tests skills in rote learning and endurance instead of aptitude or empathy. Air fare stays out of reach for most people after everything the government puts them through, unless they can pay for a private flight. Shockingly, there are now many reported cases of student suicide in places like Kota where coaching centres are found — a hint of the problems students face due to pressure to become doctors.
· Problems arising from fake schools and illegitimate connections.
· It was revealed in 2020 that over 40 medical colleges in India operated without official affiliation or recognition for more than a few years. Some of these were simply “colleges” that did not have labs, hospitals or experienced professionals. The way they worked was to:
Bribery was routinely directed at teams from the MCI (now NMC) deal with inspections.
• Reporting fake numbers for patient operational statistics
• Employing people without teaching experience to act as faculty for inspection visits
Every year, these colleges admitted hundreds, yet the degree they offered often failed to qualify for registration with a medical council. Still, numerous of them continued to work — some got into government hospitals through fake certificates or ulterior schemes.
The Connection between Politicians and Bureaucrats
Most private medical colleges in India are either owned by politicians or managed by those who act on their behalf. It isn’t surprising that selling seats illegally is common since regulators often do little about it. Corruption has been repeatedly alleged at the NMC and at its previous version, the Medical Council of India (MCI).
In 2010, the CBI arrested MCI chief Rd. Kegan Desai when they found out he had taken ₹2 crore in exchange for recognising a medical college. His storey showed just how far the problem of corruption had gone. Even so, just a few years later, his name started appearing in global medical spaces again.
Educational institutions in the medical sector are often used to launder money, with huge unreported earnings spent as capitation fees, untraceable contributions and on phoney development projects. These interactions are not just about government at the state level. When making education policies, official approval is often based on who has control and financial connetions.
Reserving a seat in postgraduate courses can be extremely hard to do.
The problem doesn’t stop at the MBBS stage. For disciplines like radiology, dermatology and orthopaedics, a seat in the postgraduate programme often costs 2 to 3 crore each year. Because the rewards can be high, these branches are considered investment seats, as some radiologists in private practice can make ₹2–3 lakh every month.
Because of this, people are marketing PG seats on social media and admissions plans are settled ahead of any official PG counselling sessions. Various cases have come to light where a candidate was bought for an entrance exam—students used software bugs or insider help to alter the outcomes.
The result? We are creating medical professionals, but not the right ones, since they got their jobs mainly because they could afford it.
What Matters
If medical education involves corruption, it doesn’t only affect those learning. It creates a threat to many millions. Those trained in places where education is failing are less experienced in handling major medical emergencies, less moral in their decisions and usually more interested in retaining what they lost than in caring for the patient.
Thinking about how much we trust someone to operate on us, give us babies or care for our parents, that trust can be easily shaken if we learn the system for ensuring those roles is broken. It also results in a strict system where being poor means you cannot become a doctor.
Because there are already too few specialists in rural areas and all over the country, turning medicine into a business is both cruel and highly dangerous.
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Why Unethical Practises in Medicine Often Begin with Corrupt Education
If corruption appears in the education process at Indian medical colleges, it spreads well beyond the admission procedures and the exam environment. It influences ICUs, operating rooms and consultation settings and changes the everyday lives of patients. Those formed in a corrupt system can end up simply doing what’s expected, instead of following what helps patients.
Doctors Are Investors, Not the Ones Who Heal
For a large number of students who gain admission to MBBS after paying ₹50 to ₹1.5 crore in capitation fees, this profession turns into an investment rather than the passion they had dreamed of. According to NITI Aayog, up to 60% of doctors starting their careers after private college studies struggle with debt. Since they do not usually recover these expenses working in rural or public places, they are often forced to move to busy private hospitals in cities.
The Centre for Policy Research mentioned in a 2021 report that more than two out of three newly hired doctors from private institutions chose their medical specialty based on what it pays rather than what’s necessary for public health.
Because of this attitude, physicians err in prescribing too many drugs, sometimes cheat and prefer earning lucrative sums from elective work instead of directing care to those in need.
Hospitals: Making Money with Commission Incentives
Corporate private hospitals in India now approach their work like target-driven sales organisations. Monthly income from surgeries, diagnostic tests and ICU patients is often decided by managers for doctors. A recent IMA study found that…
A third (37%) of doctors working in private hospitals said there was pressure to achieve billing goals.
About one in five said they had performed or suggested without justification procedures they believed could be avoided.
A whistle-blower discovered internal records in Fortis Hospital, Gurgaon, during a 2018 case, that set benchmarks for how many days each bed must be occupied, regardless of how needed by patients. One of the outcomes was a 7-year-old boy dying in the ICU after staying there too long — his expensive treatment bill totalled more than ₹15 lakh.
· Ghost Doctors and Foolish Mistakes
· In 2022, the National Medical Commission found that about 15% of students who graduated from private colleges did not perform as expected in their internal end-year exams. It gets worse because, in some places, students paid off evaluators for good grades on their final exams.
· Investigative journalists working in Uttar Pradesh found, in a 2020 sting operation, that more than 400 people had medical licences that were fake or had expired. Due to being short on staff, clinics and rural hospitals sometimes hired these “ghost doctors.” Chhattisgarh’s RTI showed that 54 of the state’s government hospitals had at least one medical officer whose credentials could not be verified.
· The death of a patient in Bihar in 2024 was because of problems following a caesarean when carried out by a doctor whose MBBS certificate was fake. He finished his training in a college that didn’t officially have an OBGYN department.
· Operations Used as an Act of Force and Unbeneficial Treatment
· A corrupt education system is to blame for people accepting excess care, just so the doctors can earn more. WHO advises that the share of births by caesarean section should not rise above 15% in any area. In India, however:
NFHS-5 shows that private hospitals have a caesarean rate of around 63%.
About three-quarters of babies born in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh arrive via private hospital C-section.
Unlike public hospitals, government hospitals have C-section rates of just 15–20%, showing that private health care batteries their patients.
Angioplasty and stenting procedures in heart treatment are now being closely reviewed. According to a 2021 audit conducted by the NPPA, many private hospitals implanted cardiac stents without supporting reasons in their patient files.
The use of kickbacks, Pharma Bribes and problems with the diagnostic lab industry
The 2016 Statement of Parliament revealed that over 15% of marketing expenses by Indian pharmaceutical companies are used for foreign trips, luxury gifts and outright bribes to doctors.
In a 2023 article, The Wire discovered that doctors in tier-1 cities can receive up to 40% of the cost of every test they suggest when using particular diagnostic labs. Without medical reason, tests for the brain (MRI), the thyroid and vitamin levels are prescribed more than other exams.
Last year in Gujarat, a doctor was found to have taken ₹26 lakh in commissions from a local diagnostic centre during 14 months — even as his patients kept coming forward with complaints about his false diagnoses.
In a corrupted culture, ethics training is better described as tokenism.
Although the NMC put a mandatory AETCOM module in place in 2019, we see little enforcement. Often, professors don’t get the guidance they need to handle these classes successfully. The results of the 2022 AIIMS faculty survey indicate that ethics courses were offered on time just over a third of the time and practical activities were included less than 20% of the time.
Students keep encountering fraudulent approaches during internships, mainly initiated by their own experienced colleagues. Over time such injustice becomes what they think is right and acceptable.
Systemic Consequences
There is a lack of doctors in rural areas: Based on the 2022–23 Rural Health Statistics, more than 60 percent of specialist positions at Community Health Centres are empty.
The government reports that medical case filings in consumer courts have gone up by 40% since 2018.
People’s confidence in doctors is falling: Local Circles survey found that 59% of Indian patients think private hospitals only care about making money.
Conclusion: A Pipeline of Profiteers
The corruption in medical education doesn’t end at the college gate. It graduates into every decision a doctor makes in their career. When students are taught — by example, not just curriculum — that money trumps merit, empathy, or ethics, they carry that lesson into every diagnosis, every surgery, and every prescription.
And as they climb hospital hierarchies or open their own clinics, this culture metastasizes — spreading greed, malpractice, and indifference. In this diseased system, healing is no longer sacred — it is strategic. And every Indian patient is one bad decision away from becoming collateral damage in a corrupt ecosystem masquerading as care.
........to be continued....
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